Title: How can Technology/Digital Platforms Strengthen Relationships in a Mentoring Programme?
Facilitator and room number: Sarah Przedpelska, Marianne Westeng (Research Project Resiliency@Work, Oslo University Hospital, Norway); Room 1.307
Documented by: Leonie Reekers
Number of participants: 17
Who are you and to which institution do you belong?
We are a team from the research project Resiliency @ Work, an interdisciplinary project at Oslo University hospital in collaboration with the mentor organization Catalysts. Our aim is to improve school participation for youth in Norway, through mentor relationships strengthened by a digital platform.
Starting questions:
How can technology/digital platforms strengthen relationships in a mentoring programme? What are potential facilitators and barriers and how can they be addressed?
The aim is to improve school participation for youth in Norway, through mentoring relationships strengthened by a digital platform.
Sequence of content/methods:
The session was organised in the form of a short workshops during which they applied different method, such as user-centred tools to engage participants in creative thinking, discussions and brainstorming. Accompanying the session they used “mentimeter”, a tool that makes it possible to vote and comment via smartphone. They asked questions during the process and at the end, e.g. how they liked the session (One possible answer: “The robots are coming”). The answers were shown as graphs on the screen.
The main part of the session was a discussion on how technology could be used during a mentoring process and how a digital platform can stimulate social inclusion in real life, from the mentor’s, mentee’s and programme manager’s perspective. The facilitators brought examples of three different fictional mentees. Each one was distributed to a different small group. The small groups had to come up with ideas on how technology could be helpful. They wrote their ideas on post-its and afterwards presented them to the other participants sorting them into the stages of the mentoring process (a huge poster on the wall).
Aim of the session presented by the facilitator:
The facilitators are developing a tool that can be used by mentoring programmes. Therefore, they took the session as a research possibility to gain information from the participants on how technology can be used during the mentoring process. The goal of the session was to identify potential barriers and to facilitate a debate about potential solutions for a digital platform.
Main questions for the discussion:
The questions in the group work regarding the (fictional) mentees were: What do they want from a digital platform? What do they want from a digital solution ? Or is there something that can’t be digitalised?
Results of Session:
It was a vivid discussion in the small groups and they came up with some ideas: Technology was presented as a way to communicate, like in online chats for example, to connect with a shy mentee. But the participants also pointed out that personal meetings are important for a human relationship, especially if the mentee is looking for personal contact. In the monitoring, technology can help to answer questions online and make achievements visible.
The facilitators thanked the participators for the wall of ideas. Some participants were especially interested in the tool “mentimeter” and in their ongoing research project.
One thing that was laughed about:
To end the ongoing group discussion Sarah said: If you can hear me now clap once, if you can hear me know clap twice. It worked.